


And Justify The Ways Of God To Man

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [26]
Category: DCU, Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Aliens, Atheism, Earth-3, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Mirror Universe, Professional Collaboration, Secret Identity, Storm drains, Writing, and Lois Lane, and the New Gods, interdimensional politics, mostly it's about aliens, public library, tbh this is barely even about religion, the non-murder kind this time, ultraman is an entitled man-child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-17 09:33:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20618822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Lois cast her eyes up to the whimsically decorated café ceiling. “The first time I’m trying to write a full-length book, and they want it to be about how God doesn’t exist.”Her recently assigned writing partner sat back in his aluminum chair, adjusted his glasses. They were truly hideous horn-rim affairs, at least twenty years out of fashion, and clashed in shade with his side-parted red hair. He’d be a walking dweeb cliché, if he weren’t currently sitting down.“Some gods exist,” G. Gordon Godfrey stated, as calmly as though he were ordering coffee. “That doesn’t mean they deserve to be worshiped.”





	And Justify The Ways Of God To Man

**Author's Note:**

> Another one for the 'AO3 has never heard of this bullshit' relationship tags! I'm amassing quite a collection. 😁
> 
> The New Gods lore here is reworked from the version of their history that the High Father told the Justice League sometime in the late 80s, which was of course biased. Darkseid especially has become steadily more cosmic over the years, but the worldbuilding to support that has been inconsistent and hard to follow, and it's not really my thing, so I went classic.

“I’m prepared to be pilloried,” said Lois.

Would almost welcome it; ever since Ultraman had started fixating on her, her life had become an endless circular struggle to be recognized as a person who _did_ things, rather than an object things were done to.

If she’d been one ounce less stubborn she’d have fled into obscurity and changed her name to become an English teacher or something, except Ultraman would probably still track her down so that would just be putting the kids in danger.

She cast her eyes up to the whimsically decorated café ceiling. “The first time I’m trying to write a full-length _book_, and they want it to be about how God doesn’t exist.”

Her recently assigned writing partner sat back in his aluminum chair, adjusted his glasses. They were truly hideous horn-rim affairs, at least twenty years out of fashion, and clashed in shade with his side-parted red hair. He’d be a walking dweeb cliché, if he weren’t currently sitting down.

“Some gods exist,” G. Gordon Godfrey stated, as calmly as though he were ordering coffee. “That doesn’t mean they deserve to be worshiped.”

“Well, that’s…” Lois paused. Considering the existence of beings like Superwoman, not _outrageous_ she supposed, but still. “A different take.”

He wasn’t really a journalist, was the thing. Even if he did write a nationally syndicated column that reacted to issues in realtime. He was a maven. He was a figure of controversy. He was an _entertainment personality._

She’d fully expected to be carrying him through this writing process; at least it was starting to look like he had something to _say_. Hopefully he didn’t expect to be the _only_ one in that position.

She should probably have dug further into the backlogs of his work.

“Is that…the direction you want to take the book?” she asked. Because if so, she was out. Adding flagrant atheism to her image was one thing; she didn’t need to brand herself a crackpot on top of everything.

“What, that the existence of ultimate power does not inherently confer moral authority, or merit admiration? I’ve said that before.” He grinned suddenly, stuffy attitude fracturing like he was letting Lois in on a secret. “Don’t worry, I know the American public prefers care and euphemism over careless attribution of divinity to anything sufficiently powerful and overbearing.”

“It certainly wouldn’t do a certain spaceman’s inflated sense of importance any good to be categorized as any kind of god,” agreed Lois flatly.

When Godfrey gave a sort of wince of agreement, she favored him with a friendly sort of smirk. “Well, good. So the pitch I got was this book is supposed to be pretty short; friendlier than the stuff Dawkins puts out, less dense than Sagan, without being warmed-over pap.”

“…that’s a different take,” said Godfrey, turning her words back on her. He’d briefly covered his mouth with one hand, but Lois wasn’t sure whether he was hiding a smile or affront.

“My editor doesn’t believe in sugar-coating things,” said Lois briskly, although more accurately Perry didn’t bother sugar-coating things _for Lois,_ since it would inevitably result in her fighting him to get a more honest set of facts.

She drummed her nails (bitten short and then filed presentable) on the tabletop. “Balalaika Publishing is a subsidiary of the Chimtech Consortium, which was absorbed by Luthorcorp last year. Luthor also privately holds a controlling interest in the Daily Planet. I don’t know if this book idea was handed down from on high all the way from the bald man himself, but it was _strongly intimated_ accepting would be a good career move. I won’t weep if it falls through, but I plan to give it an honest try.”

“I appreciate that,” said Godfrey. “I pitched the book to Balalaika, technically, but the concept has gone through some revisions.”

“So if the book was your idea,” Lois said slowly, “why am I involved at all?”

“Perspective, for one thing. Talent—experience, even; neither of us has written a book before but you’ve done several highly acclaimed long-form pieces.”

Lois watched him—politely, for her; without doing anything scathing with her face, just patiently waiting for him to answer the question properly.

“I play well on talk shows,” Godfrey said, steepling his hands and leaning forward a little. Lois could see why that was, honestly; despite a generally nebbish first impression he had a certain personal magnetism.

Partly it was his voice, a complex velvety thing with just enough reverb to lend him gravitas. It made his words resonate in person in a way they didn’t on the page, and the one-on-one format of most talk shows probably gave that a chance to shine.

“_My_ editor believes I do my best work in a process of give and take, and that furthermore for this book to achieve a wide circulation, my collaborator should be an atheist who could speak from a religious background, since I don’t have one. There were several suggestions; I asked to work with you.”

“Why?”

“I like your style.” Lois frowned. “Your writing,” Godfrey clarified. “We have very different strengths, but I think we should be able to turn that into a united front, rather than clashing. Only if you’re willing to try, of course.”

“If I wasn’t willing to try, I wouldn’t be here,” said Lois.

“Well then. Let’s get to work.”

* * *

They didn’t meet in person very frequently—Godfrey wasn’t always in Metropolis, and Lois was always busy. It was phone calls instead, and e-mailing each other back and forth drafts and fragments of drafts, until it was almost inevitable that a repeated file name would lead to saving over something you shouldn’t, and lose them some of their work.

Luckily Lois had years of needing to reproduce notes and entire stories destroyed by supervillain interference from memory, by this point.

But the phone turned out to be the most important part, because Godfrey thought best out loud and had a knack for drawing out Lois’ ideas, things she might not have bothered to pursue on her own because she couldn’t be sure they’d make good copy—she’d gotten into the habit of rush, she realized, of finding things she could be sure of as fast as she could and putting them together in the most natural way, without stopping to reconsider anything but whether it was _true_ and made _sense_, and sounded good enough to get people’s attention.

Because the paper went out every day, and she might be kidnapped by a supervillain in ten minutes so she had to make this moment, while she still had it, _count._

It didn’t stop her from being good. One of the best, Perry said. But it had stopped her from being as good as she _could be_, and she hadn’t even noticed herself stultifying until she had this unbroken string of months with Ultraman safely locked away, and someone encouraging her to push herself.

* * *

_“What do you believe in?_” Godfrey asked her one evening about eight months in, as they were brainstorming their way through the outline of the opening chapter, now that they had a clear enough idea of what the book as a whole was going to contain to start figuring out how to frame it.

Lois was at her kitchen table, covered as usual with papers, the phone cord wrapped around her left wrist to minimize the collateral damage of toying with it as she jotted down thoughts.

“Nothing, Godfrey,” she reminded him. As if he had forgotten what their book was even about. As if he doubted her sincerity, which was all she had. And yet somehow she wasn’t really angry.

Maybe she trusted him, by this point, not to mean those things. Not to try to cut her apart, or cut her down.

_“I don’t believe that,”_ Godfrey answered. _“I would say that you believe, at least, in Lois Lane._”

Her breath snagged in her throat, for a second, and she pressed down with her pencil too hard. Of course she did. She had to, or nobody would. “That’s not the same,” she told him. “You know it’s not.”

_“It is,_” Godfrey said. _“It matters. People need something, isn’t that what you said? To keep them brave. That’s why they hang on to their gods, even in the face of cruelty and neglect. If we want this book to matter at all, we need a way…to help them feel that they’re worth believing in. Without needing to borrow worth from anyone else._”

* * *

He strolled into their seventh in-person meeting in two years of work looking abstracted, his wide-cut pink shirt collar folded up on one side and poking him in the cheek, carrying a bag of fresh muffins, which he put down on top of Lois’ stack of freshly sharpened pencils without seeming to notice.

Godfrey was getting his own television show next quarter, which should be _interesting_, and their publisher was making impatient noises, so they had to more or less wrap the project up within the next two months, enough at least for Balalaika’s editors to tear into a complete manuscript. Which was…actually a shame, because he was surprisingly fun to collaborate with.

Lois normally hated having to accommodate herself to anyone to the degree cooperative writing took, and especially hated working with men, because pushing back against their automatic, subconscious-level assumptions about how important their opinions were compared to hers _without_ coming across as a vicious bitch took so much effort that it undermined anything she could possibly write.

But Godfrey was one of the good ones—she wasn’t sure even now that he’d manage not to undercut her in a group environment, but one-on-one he treated her like an actual person with no particular sign of effort. And assumed neither that her cordiality was an invitation to presume intimacy, nor that she should be honored by his praise.

And the book…all Lois had been aiming at when she agreed to have her byline on it was that it be something of which she was not ashamed, but it had grown, over the two years they’d worked on it. It probably qualified as a work of modern philosophy at this point, but Lois doubted it would be seen that way and sort of hoped not, or at least hoped it would be seen that way only in retrospect.

Nobody _wanted_ to read Great Works of Philosophy; there was some kind of rule that in order to Matter in Important Subjects you also had to be horrifically dull.

And whether you were dull or not, if you were perceived as trying too hard to be Meaningful you became inherently ridiculous, and an object of ridicule. There was a reason she hadn’t tried to write a book since she was fourteen, and still fancied herself a potential novelist.

It was still going to be a deceptively simple little book. Two hundred pages, Lois estimated, paperback.

They were meeting in one of the little conference rooms you could reserve on the upper floors of the Main Branch of the Metropolis Public Library, because they needed a quiet space, Godfrey was in the process of packing up to move to LA and no longer had a table or anywhere to sit, and Lois hadn’t done dishes in three weeks, which didn’t equate to an environment conducive to concentration.

(Her apartment didn’t _reek_; she rinsed every dish after she used it, leaving nothing to rot, but the place was just…a wreck with no clear flat surfaces right now; she’d had a lot of deadlines lately and there’d been credible Ultraman sightings cropping up again for the last few weeks, which never did anything for her ability to sleep or engage in sensible long-term decisionmaking.

And since the Wilson assassination nine days ago every journalist on the Eastern seaboard had been run off their feet, either chasing some aspect of the story or covering for those who were.

Lois had done an editorial and two major analysis pieces, but the government had specifically asked that she not insert herself into the actual investigation. Ultraman’s fixation on her could compromise security.)

“We have to cut this paragraph,” Lois said. “I know you love it, Godfrey, but which of us has a writing degree? It doesn’t fit here. You can crop out some of the language—that sentence, I know it’s your favorite—and put it in where we talk about dualism in the introduction, but whatever mental leap you’re making to connect these two concepts isn’t one most of our readers are going to be able to follow, and it’s going to get in the way of the rest of the passage.”

Godfrey sighed and ran a hand through his bangs. His gaze still kept fixing somewhere faraway, but he was at least mostly listening to her. “Fine. Yes, alright, I accept your judgment.” He highlighted the sentence to be plundered for its eloquence and then scratched his pen through the rest of the paragraph, stark removal.

She hadn’t meant to force him to do it himself; making cuts was always difficult. She’d have excised it for him once he agreed.

Instinct screamed.

Lois had an instant to hear the distinctive deadly buzz from somewhere outside and see Godfrey’s eyes widen, before he—lunged across the table at her, knocking her and her chair to the floor, separately. He was heavier than he looked, and drove the breath out of her, so that she hadn’t even had time to demand the ‘what’ of _what the hell?_ before the outer wall of the library burst apart under the familiar red lance of Kryptonian heat vision.

Lois didn’t know if the blast had been intended to hit her originally, or Godfrey, but it flicked down toward the pair of them rather than drill into the opposite wall and through the entire library, and she sincerely contemplated slapping G. Gordon Godfrey across the face as her last living act, because _what possible use_ did he think throwing her to the ground and crushing her was going to be? It just meant she was going to be burned in half while _helpless to dodge_, and with a total lack of dignity.

The red beams hit Godfrey’s back and _splashed._

This time she did manage,_ “What._”

Godfrey planted his hands on the ground and shoved his weight up off her, breathing heavily like a man who’d been punched in the ribs, rather than someone who’d been hit in the back with murder lasers.

His glasses were dangling by one temple; he slid them crookedly back into place without ceasing to loom over her, weight seeming somehow precarious on one hand and both knees.

“Excuse me,” he mumbled.

Lois repeated, “_What._”

Ultraman’s broad, square hands wrenched at the edges of the hole he’d made until he’d torn away enough concrete bricks to make a space for himself. Often enough, he just flew at a wall and let it get out of the way in pieces when it hit him, but he’d done that into Luthor traps often enough to develop a certain caution even when his X-ray vision wasn’t obviously blocked.

He hovered into the now-wrecked study room. “Lois,” he said, glowering down at her. Didn’t try to kill her again. Maybe the first shot had been aimed at burning some of her hair off, or something; he liked that kind of petty, pinpoint lashing-out, as if to remind her he could do anything he wanted, and was refraining only as a courtesy. “I’d _heard_ you’d been unfaithful—”

“Go to hell,” she spat.

(People asked her how she could speak to him like that, over and over when he could get tired of it and kill her any time, but he hadn’t killed her yet and why change a system that worked.

And would it be worth living, if she had to buy every day by catering to his outrageous entitlement, even in words? _Especially_ in words? No.)

As often happened, he kept talking as though she hadn’t said anything. “—while I was indisposed, but _this_ individual…”

Godfrey had lurched up onto his knees as they spoke, clutching at his chest even though it was his back that had been hit, and a second later he came fully upright and rounded on Ultraman, holding some kind of hexagonal green…_object_ covered with geometric figures that vaguely reminded Lois of circuitry. Brandished it with intent, like a cop with a badge, and drew himself up with a startling amount of dignity.

There _were_ holes burned into the back of his coat, she saw. And his shirt. Burn marks on the skin underneath, but—critically—_not_ laser trails drilled through his torso.

“By the authority vested in me as envoy of the Lord of Apocalypse,” Godfrey said, that voice he was so vain of only lightly shaky, “I abjure you to _stand down._”

Ultraman snorted. “You think I care about your authority?”

“I think,” Godfrey stated, reaching up with his free hand to straighten those awful glasses, “you care about transgressing against a power you cannot match.”

“I am not afraid of that boulder-headed tyrant,” Ultraman sneered.

Godfrey said, “You don’t have to _fear_ a man, to respect his power.”

“I’ll fight him. I’ll fight _anyone_.”

“Maybe you believe you could defeat His Majesty,” Godfrey allowed, with a faint hint of pitying scorn that the Kryptonian could _possibly_ delude himself enough to believe such a thing, “but could you at the same time take on his Elite, and the Furies of his honor guard?”

Lois watched the twitch of uncertainty start in Ultraman’s eyes. She had seen him lose before—she had seen him lose before _plenty of times;_ she had _beaten him personally_ on three separate occasions, although the latest one really didn’t count because all she’d done was slap on a pair of cuffs after Luthor and Graves got him down, before he could rally or they could close in—but she had never seen him admit the possibility that there was an enemy he couldn’t defeat.

That stubbornness was something she could have respected, in someone else. In him it was just of a piece with the raging child that screamed _if I can’t have it, nobody can!_ and knocked down other people’s building-block castles.

Though to be more strictly fair than she liked, she wasn’t actually dead yet. And she’d told him no enough times.

“And he suddenly _cares—”_ With trepidation, Lois watched Ultraman master himself. He was at his most dangerous when he got his emotions under control, as terrifying as his destructive fits of rage could be.

“Very well, Envoy,” he said with bad grace. “You may go; tell your master I left you unmolested after you declared yourself. And let him know I want to hear what he thinks he’s doing, sending agents undercover on _my_ world.”

“I don’t believe your authority here has been recognized by…well, anyone.”

Ultraman’s eyes were narrowed pits of red. “How long would it take, envoy,” he asked, “for your master to come if you called? How long would it take him to look for you, if you were dead before you could call?”

Godfrey’s body language drew in, sudden anxiety though no retreat, the circuit-badge thing vanishing into his breast pocket or wherever it had come from again as his hands curled toward his torso. Ultraman’s shoulders canted forward like a dog scenting prey.

“Well,” Godfrey began, with unconvincing bravado, and then abruptly his hand lashed out from his sternum again and let fly a small object, which shot out small, threatening segmented limbs as it flew.

Ultraman slapped it out of the air. It shattered on the floor.

He looked back at Godfrey with a smirk.

A jet of green light _slammed_ into the side of his head and he went down, eyes rolled up and gravity suddenly asserting itself.

Lois loved the sound of him hitting the floor. Legal opinion was currently split on whether her emergency laser was covered by her concealed-carry permit, but since Ultraman was definitely in contravention of about twelve restraining orders any time he came near her and it wasn’t a useful weapon against anyone else, Lois didn’t expect to ever suffer worse for it than hassling by opportunistic cops.

Luthor had offered to disguise it as a lipstick, on the basis that it would be easier to smuggle places; she’d asked him to make it a lighter instead, then had to accept the lipstick one as well, so she could have it in her carry-on on planes.

The _real_ problem was getting it out and pointed at Ultraman and making a shot connect, before he noticed and took it away. Superspeed was a bitch like that. She’d learned to wait for her moment; Godfrey had made a great distraction. She pumped another bolt into her super-stalker as he started to try to get up, and his arms collapsed from under him.

The weapon wasn’t very strong—couldn’t be, not without emitting an unsafe level of radiation. The Kryptonite inside was the merest granule, only a little bigger than sand.

Lois was very much looking forward to Luthor having another breakthrough in power source wattage, or simulating the anti-Kryptonian energy, or radiation shielding or _something_. She pushed it with a third shot, then lowered the fake lighter with a hiss of mingled frustration and pain as it overheated against her palm. It wouldn’t help to burn it out.

Godfrey flung a second mechanical spider in Ultraman’s direction and wheeled toward the door, snatching up Lois’ hand as he ran by and dragging her with him. “Come on, _run._”

Running from Ultraman worked more often than it had any right to do, considering his powers. Object permanence issues, possibly. Short attention span. Lois yanked her hand free—surprised to find it wasn’t difficult—and matched pace, out of the ruined study room and down the hall toward the stairs, through the panicked evacuation of everyone else who’d been using the library with the singular focus of the hunted.

As they burst out the emergency exit into the parking area behind the library, Lois asked, “Guessing that won’t keep him down long, either?”

“Not with the amount of yellow sun he gets. Should tire him out, though.”

She put on a little more speed, ducking between first parked cars and then buildings as fast as she could—more layers of solid object to look through wouldn’t _stop_ the Kryptonian from zeroing in on her, not when according to him he’d long since memorized the shape of her bones and the beat of her heart, but they complicated the process. She kept her breathing steady. They had some time. “And if he catches up…”

“I suppose I’ll catch more lasers.”

Unless Godfrey was _also_ hiding some kind of super-speed, she doubted that was going to be an adequate solution. She supposed she appreciated his optimism, in a way.

Lois finally spotted an accessible manhole. “This way,” she said, dropping down to pull it open.

Luthor had _just_ started pushing city government to assemble a commission to look into replacing the old lead storm drains with something more environmentally friendly when Ultraman launched his first attack on Metropolis; now no one suggested such a thing. People even superstitiously refused to replace their lead paint, even though the concentration wasn’t enough to even inconvenience the man, and plenty enough to damage child development. Lois had written more than one article about that.

“Why,” Godfrey groaned at the sight of the waiting drain, a clearly rhetorical question, and clambered down the blackened ladder into the dark. Lois followed him, pulling the manhole back into place one-handed with the ease of long practice. When she got to the bottom of the tunnel, she switched on her emergency flashlight.

“Whew,” said Godfrey. Lois flicked the beam around the section of tunnel they were in, saw no threats, and started walking—it was important to be as far away as possible by the time Ultraman started looking, because the lead of the pipe would conceal her from his sight, but only (greatly) muffle her heartbeat.

“I admit,” she whispered, voiceless, knowing her voice was unusually easy for Ultraman to pick out of the babble at this point, but that not engaging the vocal cords added a lot of anonymity, “I’m disappointed you _can’t_ take him out with your own alien superpowers.”

“I’m not a fighter!” Godfrey hissed back, without any effort to demur about being in fact an alien with superpowers. “Being able to take a few hits is one thing, but I can’t go head-to-head against someone like that!”

“And your backup isn’t going to be here in time?”

“My backup has a _very long commute._”

Well. That was fair enough.

“You’re the only one on Earth?”

“At the moment.”

Time to press. “And what are you?”

He flashed his most charming smile, which looked absurd here in the dark lit only by her pocket light. “Glorious Gordon Godfrey, Herald of Apocalypse.” He let the grin fade slightly. “Technically, I’m what’s known as a New God.”

Lois opened her mouth, shut it again. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, but doubted she could keep it safely to a whisper if she tried to decide on the spot.

She jerked her head, _this way,_ and took off at a run.

* * *

After about twenty minutes, when both of them were winded enough—unless Godfrey was faking—to need a break, Lois let them slow down to a plod.

The storm drains were infinitely preferable to sewers, but the clammy air was heavy with the smell of mold, and their shoes by this time squelched with each step they didn't splash in still, stinking water.

There were volumes of things unsaid. Ultraman knew about whatever this Apocalypse and New God business was _and she didn’t,_ which was utterly, categorically not to be borne.

Lois decided to start at the only logical place. She dug an elbow into Godfrey’s side. It was nothing like elbowing a brick wall, in spite of the resilience he’d demonstrated in the library. “_Glorious? _Your first name is _Glorious?_”

Godfrey straightened up, readjusting his glasses wryly. “I’d say it sounds better in the original language, but it really doesn’t. In my defense, I was fifteen. Well. The equivalent of fifteen.”

“The equivalent of?”

“Developmentally,” Godfrey agreed, which wasn’t an explanation. “Where I come from, we name ourselves when we become adults, and I was always precocious. It turns out you can develop full control of your native powers and good spiritual awareness and still have all the judgment and sophistication of a teenager.”

He shrugged philosophically. “It could be worse. I have a colleague who named himself in active wartime and now has to walk around introducing himself as something that translates roughly as ‘Unending Agony.’ And my little sister is a dancer called ‘Amazing Grace,’ so you see I was an excellent influence.”

“…you realize I’m still adjusting to the idea that you’re an alien.”

Ordinary, inexplicably likeable, silly-looking redheaded entertainment personalities shouldn’t turn around and block lasers or pull out alien technology from their jackets. Lois was trying not to feel stung—she’d never suspected a thing! She’d considered him a _friend._

Another of those philosophical shrugs. “It’s not as though I ever claimed otherwise.”

Lois paused, and ran over in her head every publication of his that she’d read—which was a lot, by this point. At no point had he _ever_ asserted his humanity, though he’d let it be assumed in plenty of places, and a few strange turns of phrase now made more sense.

She narrowed her eyes at him, though it probably wasn't visible in the gloom. Or maybe his species could see in the dark, what did she know. “Were you a lawyer on your home planet?”

“There are no lawyers on Apokolips.” He paused expectantly for a second, waiting (Lois realized) for her to make the requisite lawyer joke, and when she didn’t he smiled faintly and added, “I _was_ a legislator and…appellate judge, I suppose.

“We’re an absolute monarchy, you see,” he explained.

“Thought so.” Honestly that was preferable to_ most_ interpretations of a phrase like ‘your master the Lord of Apocalypse.’ “What do you think of our democratic republic system?”

“Inefficient. Hilarious. Corrupt. It has its advantages,” he backpedaled, when Lois glared at him again, which he could evidently picked up on somehow, “but I’m on good terms with the king, and he’s good at his job, so I very rarely run into the drawbacks of autocracy.”

“If you’re such a high muckety-muck, _Glorious_ Godfrey, what are you doing here?” Lois stomped one foot in the latest puddle of dirty water for emphasis. _Here_ in the sense of ‘the Metropolis storm drains,’ but undercover on Earth more generally. Spreading anti-theism and a gospel of human emotional self-sufficiency.

His mouth twitched sideways. “Outer Space Cold War. Our enemies have been looking into acquiring Earth as a dominion world, and it’s in my people’s interest to see that they fail.

“Yours too,” he added, with a manner of such perfect frankness that Lois grew immediately suspicious. Godfrey had always tailored his delivery to his audience, and she had long since realized that with her he favored a blunt laying-out of facts supplemented by more subtle details afterward. It was exactly the right tone to take, and Lois detested being managed.

“If they get a foothold you’ll either wind up sucked dry for resources with half your population conscripted, or your world will be devastated fighting them off.”

“And if you get one?”

“If…? Oh. No. We don’t really work that way.” He adjusted his glasses again. Was it possible he actually needed those? Maybe they had advanced alien technology built in. “Our defensive strategy relies mostly on concentrating our lines enough that we can reinforce them with everything we have; if we tried to spread across a web of colonies the way they do, we’d be wiped out.

“It might be an effective strategy long-term,” he admitted, “if we were willing to take strategic losses, but His Majesty has what I hope are understandable hang-ups about bringing people into the line of fire and then failing to keep them secure.”

“Hmm,” said Lois, because this _sounded_ like a case of ethics leading straight to inevitable defeat, but either part of that could be spin. She flicked the light off the drain ahead of them and onto his face, searching for microexpressions that might give him away. “So if you can’t protect us, what’s your angle?”

“Earth’s equipped to defend itself,” Godfrey explained. He seemed very earnest. “You’ve got a very appealing world here, though not quite as much as it would have been a few thousand years ago, and you’ve got a lot of cultural tropes that New Genesis would love to play on, but you’ve also got a large concentration of force. If they can’t get an initial psy-op off the ground, which it’s my job to ensure, they’ll probably move on to easier targets.”

Lois returned her flashlight to the tunnel. There should be two more branches before the one they needed, but she scanned the wall around each dark hole they passed for the chiseled symbol that would mark her route. “And they run their psy-ops through religion?”

“They try.” Gordon shrugged. “Your world is almost too advanced for them to bother, so I also expect to see a lot of focus on stoking particular strains of xenophobia and alienating the public as much as possible from the metahumans and refugees that make up so much of your best defenses.”

Which explained all his work on the nature of personhood and advocacy for civil rights across the board, rather than on the basis of humanity—a campaign that would _not_ be helped if his true identity were leaked at a bad moment. He sniffed. “Your Ultraman is helping them there, not that he cares.”

“He’s not _my_ Ultraman.”

“Apologies.” They walked in silence except for the sounds of shoes on wet concrete for a few seconds. “I really do respect your work. All of it.”

“Well. I hope you don’t expect me to be too excited by your approval. _Glorious_ as you apparently are.”

“If you really _must_ keep repeating it in that tone…”

Lois cocked her head, and thought about the two months when she was seven and had wanted her name to be Leia Lucinda Laser Lollipop, and what it would be like to have _gotten_ that wish, and have to live with it over twenty years later. “Hey,” she said, nudging him with her elbow as they splashed onward through a patch of standing water. “According to George Lucas, in some galaxy somewhere there is a drug-dealing alien named _El__án Sleazbaggano_, so I think Glorious Godfrey is something I can cope with.”

Godfrey’s smile was very wry. “My human paperwork actually says _Glorio_ Gordon Godfrey.”

“Human paperwork that is fake,” she stated, just to be clear. After all, Ultraman’s was _mostly_ real, even if he never used it now.

“…it was the result of some fairly dedicated efforts at translation. I’m more literally called ‘Brilliant With Victory the Sturdy Fortress Denies All Gods.’ It’s…more compact in the original. And alliterative. The alliteration is important.”

“I see.”

“It really does have the syllables ‘Grr’dan.’”

“You want I should call you Gordon now?”

“You can if you want.”

She didn’t, particularly.

“My childhood name was actually Ardon. Please don’t use it in public, but we are friends, I think, so…”

Lois narrowed her eyes, came to an entire stop to emphasize her expression, making sure enough light was falling on it to let her squint be seen. “Are you _managing_ me?”

“Maybe a little. Look, I’m sorry about my undercover assignment _and_ having blown it like this. Now I think about it, it was unlikely he was about to kill you so unceremoniously after so long.”

“You think?” Lois shoved her bangs back from her sticky forehead. “He might have been trying to set my hair on fire again, in which case thank you, or he might have been originally targeting you, in which case your rescue attempt made no difference. Either way, you’re not responsible for the fact that Ultraman attempts to murder anyone he sees as competing for my attention.” She cast him a look. “Though if your authority as some sort of space marshal could extend to arresting him for interplanetary crimes…”

“Technically this counts as his homeworld,” Gordon said. “Since he grew up here. We’re, ah, actually in a different legal system for dimensional reasons, but what authorities there are in your sector would consider his behavior a local matter, sorry. We did have him in custody for a while a few years back, for trouble he caused on Apokolips itself.”

Lois started walking again, as she thought back over some of Ultraman’s unexplained disappearances. “Ninety-two through ninety-four?” she asked.

“Yes. He got away eventually, I think he may be the most accomplished escape artist our _prison_ system has ever seen.”

“Ours too,” Lois agreed absently. The stress on _prison_ there had been odd—had some other system they ran seen a better one?

“Ultraman is actually the one who brought your world to New Genesis’ attention.”

Lois closed her eyes. Even allowing for how biased Godfrey’s account of his war was likely to be, _of course_ Ultraman would bring extradimensional space colonizers down on them. Of course he would. She opened them again. Follow the story. Dimensional reasons, he’d said. “You’re in another dimension.”

“Sort of. We weren’t originally, it has to do with an ancient weapons malfunction. Don’t ask me to explain, I’m not a physicist.”

“Not a fighter, not a scientist…I don’t see that there’s much call for legislators or judges _undercover on alien planets_, so what else are you?”

Godfrey smiled sunnily in the murk of the tunnel, a flash of teeth. “I’m a diplomat.”

“And a spy.”

“And a spy,” he affirmed cheerfully. “But I really do have your best interests at heart.”

“What’s your war about?” she asked, rather than addressing that knotty claim.

Godfrey took a breath and let it out again with a little shake of his shoulders, as though he was squaring himself up to fight this war of his, rather than only talk about it. But then, words were his weapon, weren’t they.

“New Genesis,” he said, “is the capital world reigning over the remnant of an ancient empire. It’s a lovely place…a lot like this, actually, all green and blue, but their cities float in the sky, and the landscape beneath has been kept pristine.” There was something in his tone, sad but not exactly heavy. Not quite nostalgia. A sort of half-hearted melancholy, maybe. “I’ve only seen pictures. It’s supposed to be a lot like Urgrund, the First World, where our people came from, but of course that was destroyed long ago. When the cataclysm came—what left us on the other side of the barrier, with so few stars within our reach—very few inhabited worlds survived.

“My homeworld, Apokolips, was settled originally as a mining colony. There had been no effort to preserve the environment for the enjoyment of the laborers assigned there, and it was an unlovely place from the beginning, and we were never treated well by the First World. And so when New Genesis emerged supreme above the other survivors and came to us demanding tribute…we refused. We had had enough.

“Our planetary leader Yuga Khan refused to recognize the Fourth World, seceded from the Empire of the Gods, and established Apokolips as the Kingdom of Revelation.”

“Hm,” said Lois.

The carefully non-judgmental note was intentional; Godfrey just as intentionally ignored it.

“The hierarchs of New Genesis were disinclined to accept this, and even less to allow us a foothold anywhere else in the limited dimension the anti-life cannon had twisted us into. They had much more high technology available, a fleet of fast new ships, and most of the other surviving colony-worlds to draw from, but we had a far higher manufacturing capacity and outnumbered them one hundred to one. And so for three long generations now, our people have been at war.”

“What’s it like?” Lois wished she had a notepad on her, or her tape recorder. She’d trained herself to memorize every word of a source’s testimony and her memory had always been good, but there was nothing like having something to refer to. “Your homeworld.”

“…it’s on fire,” Godfrey said, after a pause, and _now_ there was nostalgia. “All the time. One of the most important resources we were sent to mine has to be extracted from the lower mantle, and a complicated system of heat venting was devised to make this possible. Everywhere else in the universe feels cold, if you’ve lived there, and Earth showers are extremely disappointing.”

Lois laughed. Metropolis had an unusually good water system, courtesy of three generations of unrelated millionaires who'd considered it important to keep the City of Tomorrow’s infrastructure up to date, but complaining about shower pressure was still a national pastime.

“The streets smell of ozone and mercury, and the light is low and red because our star is not a young one. It’s never dark, even on the longest night of winter, because of the planetflame. The buildings reach up and down from the surface ten thousand feet high, and all the children sneak off with gliders on their free duty cycles and practice soaring on the hot updrafts that run along the canyons, away from the eternal fires. It’s very ugly,” he said, but he said it with fondness. More subdued, then, “New Genesis never lets us forget that so are we. Our species…what we look like on the outside depends very much on what we look like within, and the sort of strength Apokolips builds in you does not lend itself to beauty.”

“What do you look like?” Lois asked—a little intimate, in her delivery, entirely free of judgment; privately consumed with curiosity.

The look Godfrey gave her was startled, but not offended. “Me? Oh, this. Well, I have my hair gelled down. It’s actually curly.”

Lois’ mouth twitched, wondering if the _diplomat_ had just casually insulted her entire species along with his own, and what sort of appearance the floating cities of New Genesis engendered, that he would call beautiful. “I think you look fine.”

His smile was warm and still seemed very human. “Thank you. I’m an exception, though; I was born the son of the king’s favorite and raised in luxury, and as I had no talent for war my education ran toward soft and delicate things, and that was what I grew with my mind fixed upon. My sister, the dancer, is a noted beauty.”

“And beauty means looking like…us?” Lois asked. Apparently he’d been doing the opposite of insulting humanity.

“More or less. It means that on a lot of planets, actually…there’s debate about why. There’s nothing in physics to encourage this body shape to be as common as it is, let alone to account for such a unified standard of aesthetics. Probably some more obscure constant of the universe is involved, but no one’s isolated it.”

“That’s a little disappointing,” Lois admitted.

“I know, right?” Godfrey grinned, white teeth standing out in the edge of her flashlight’s glow. “One wants aliens to introduce truly alien perspectives.

"Not that our ancestors thought so,” he added, growing grim. “When the hierarchs of Urgrund built the anti-life cannon, it was intended to wipe out everything sufficiently…inhuman, I suppose is the only workable translation. All that was too ugly and alien, starting with the people we’d been at war with for millennia by then, for no particular reason except that they were the other advanced species native to our galaxy, and we didn’t like their faces.”

“Ugh,” said Lois sympathetically.

“Mm. They deserved what happened to them, the Old Gods. It’s just a shame they took several galaxies with them.”

“I hear that.” Lois doubted everyone in the dead civilization had deserved what happened; in her experience these things were never unanimous. But that was a limited experience, and she had no business arguing with him about his own cultural history based on no actual knowledge of the situation.

It would be bad journalism, even if she _did_ have any right.

“It’s a great disadvantage in our modern war,” said Godfrey, more briskly. “The New Gods’ preferred approach to undeveloped worlds, as we discussed, involves impersonating some sort of higher power, and their beauty usually helps them gain people’s trust. Some of our early intercessions backfired horribly because the agents we sent provoked immediate revulsion in the locals.”

Which explained a great deal about his career path and probably his upbringing, Lois thought.

“So noted,” Lois said. “I’ll try to contain my vapors. If I ever meet anyone else from your planet,” she clarified. She wondered what they looked like. Rocks? Living spires of metal? Lava blobs? Or maybe sort of craggy trolls? Or maybe they just all had terrible acne.

Or maybe it depended so entirely on the individual that she wouldn’t take them for members of the same species, if she weren’t told better.

* * *

It took only another fifteen minutes of carefully navigating the dripping tunnels before Lois led Godfrey to the drain nearest her thoroughly Luthortech-secured apartment building, and then she made him wait in silence at the bottom of the ladder as she watched the sky.

It only took seventy seconds for Ultraman to swoop by, in that too-familiar surveillance pattern. Shit. Lois pulled the manhole shut and climbed back down into the damp-smelling dark to think.

Unless Ultraman got bored soon, the three blocks cutting them off from her apartment’s defenses were impassable. Unfortunately, the old storm drain system didn’t reach nearly far enough uptown to get them safely within range of the Luthorcorp building’s shields, either.

She really did need to talk to Luthor about setting up more Kryptonian-proofed shelters—he’d been worried, last she checked, about encouraging Ultraman to target specific neighborhoods that way, about buying up real estate for specialized purposes even as he tried to ameliorate Metropolis’ longstanding housing crisis, and about the fact that he couldn’t _possibly_ build enough for everybody, and once a certain number of shelters existed Ultraman would probably make a game of treating anyone _not_ inside one as official fair game.

All these things were true, but there had to be a way to work around them. Thus far he had been poking at a way to twist through the labyrinth of zoning laws to set the buildings up to work as other sorts of shelters when Ultraman wasn’t an imminent threat, but even a billionaire had to be careful about how he fought City Hall.

“We need a new plan,” Lois concluded, once she’d filled Godfrey in on the central points of this. “I’m open to suggestions.”

“Can’t we just continue to wait him out?”

“He’s going to keep coming,” Lois said flatly. “If he stays focused on something for more than an hour, it’ll take him days to get bored enough to give up. Eventually he’ll pick out my heartbeat even down here, if he keeps trying long enough, especially if I sit still. _How_ long is your backup’s commute?”

Godfrey looked pretentiously discontented. “Well, not long at all if I use my nuclear option, but that’s something of a last resort.”

“Will your nuclear option damage the city?”

“It shouldn’t. I mean, not worse than provoking Ultraman does in general.”

“Do it.”

“We’ll want to be aboveground first.”

“Okay.”

* * *

It was Godfrey who went up into the alleyway to wait for Ultraman’s flight pattern to bring him back into sight, and then on Lois’ instructions waited two and a half more minutes for him to be at the farthest point in the cycle, before he tapped the manhole to tell her to come out.

As agreed, while Lois was still ascending the iron ladder out of the drains, Godfrey flung down what looked like a six-sided die covered in circuit patterns, which (without warning but to only the mildest surprise on Lois’ part; she was clearly growing jaded to alien drama of all varieties) promptly exploded into a vision-killing ribbon of white light, edged with rainbows.

The blinding brilliance began to die down as Lois got her feet on the pavement, and by the time she was kicking the manhole cover back into place visibility had improved enough to reveal a figure like the upright head of a sledgehammer, feet planted as though they had been rammed into the earth.

“_WHO’S BEEN NAUGHTY?_” boomed a voice like the garage door of heaven. “_WILL I—_oh, it’s only you, God-free,” it interrupted itself, only slightly less huge but immensely less thunderous. “And?” it asked expectantly.

Lois’ flash-blindness finished fading, to reveal the initial impression as entirely accurate, if incomplete. The new arrival seemed to be an elderly woman, about eight feet tall, two of them craggy face, clad blindingly in gold scale-mail tights of some kind, unless of course those were simply her legs, with the same gold scale (armor?) pattern extending over her belly and partway up a generous bust. Her sides, arms, and upper chest were covered in a stiff-looking blue substance shaped to either reveal or suggest impressive musculature, though not on reflection as impressive as that in her legs, and a scarlet cape was pinned with a gold circle at each shoulder. Polished black boots dug into the asphalt underfoot.

Her mouth was full and bright red, and her eyebrows immense dark flourishes across the top half of her face. A large puff of silver hair topped the ensemble.

The general effect was of a fairy godmother, garbed for a war she had been fighting for decades uncounted against the forces of hell.

At present, she was aiming a massive interrogative expression at Lois personally. “Lois Lane,” that intrepid reporter volunteered. “Correspondent for the _Daily Planet_,” she added, in case the apparition was overzealous about identifying unknowns as ‘naughty.’

“Greetings, charming earthling. God-free, I thought you’d tracked down Scott.”

Godfrey shook his head. “I can’t even be sure he’s still on this world. You know better than anyone how slippery he is, Granny. No, Lois and I have just spent upwards of an hour being pursued by the Last Kryptonian.”

He waved toward the sky, where Ultraman was of course arrowing in on them already, now that Lois was aboveground and talking. ‘Granny’ followed the look, narrowed her eyes, and gave a pointed sniff.

“Nearly as good,” she declared. Kicked off from the ground hard, and rose into Ultraman’s line of normal, non-X-ray sight like a bottle rocket. The sight of her did not quite keep up with the ascent of her voice, which reached Ultraman seconds before he saw her. “**_KAL-EL_**_!_” she heralded her own coming. “_I UNDERSTAND YOU’VE BEEN A **BAD BOY** SINCE OUR LAST TALK._”

The sight of slack horror overtaking Ultraman’s face was one to make Lois wish desperately that Jimmy were there to immortalize it.

_“WHAT DO WE SAY WHEN WE’VE BEEN BAD? KAL-EL, **TALK TO GRANNY**…_”

He physically blanched. “Oh, hell no.”

“LANGUAGE!” Granny lunged in sharply, just barely missed her grab as Ultraman flashed out of reach.

“Never again!” he declared, and streaked off into the sunset, if the sun had been setting, which it wasn’t just yet.

A weathered fist the size of a baked chicken shook. “_REMEDIAL LESSONS!_” Granny proclaimed, and swooped off after him.

Lois continued staring for several seconds after they were out of sight, in a sort of delighted uncomprehending disbelief.

“She runs our prison system,” Godfrey explained. “Also our schools.” A moment’s silence, and then: “She _does_ know the difference. At least, she knows the children aren’t criminals. I’m not entirely sure she knows the criminals aren’t children.”

* * *

Ultimately, the government freaked out a little more than Lois would normally have expected.

But less than two weeks out from the assassination of the President’s son within the White House itself, even if the first edge of panic had worn off every agency was still running in a state of shocked emergency. Especially regarding mysterious new superpowered beings in red capes.

(Which Lois wasn’t supposed to know the June Assassin had worn, but she had her sources.)

So it was really no surprise.

It _was_ startling how quickly the CBI showed up on the scene after Granny Goodness made her arrival and departure, but the blinking, beeping boxes they were referring to as they came suggested they had a means of tracking whatever energy signature that…summoning die gave off.

Which might explain why it was a last-ditch option on Godfrey’s part.

Granny hadn’t responded to demands for comment or even slowed down enough to talk before vanishing in pursuit of Kal-El, and Godfrey didn’t volunteer responsibility. In fact, he ducked out seconds ahead of the Feds, leaving Lois to account for the fact that Ultraman had been chased away by a flying old woman in armor who looked sort of like Tim Curry, without making any government agents decide she knew more than she was saying.

Fortunately, she’d built trust with a lot of the agents assigned to the Metropolis offices over the years. Being constantly in the middle of bizarre alien supervillain attacks put you in the way of the local federal intelligence branches on a regular basis, and this was no different from the others as far as they knew, not as far as Lois’ involvement went.

She was the perennial target, the woman who walked alive out of disaster and catastrophe through some unlikely combination of grit, Ultraman’s possessiveness, and the devil’s own luck. She’d started talking to these men, and the few women among them, as much to be known, and thought of, and addressed as _Lois_ and _Ms. Lane_ rather than _the victim_, which had gotten old after the first two times, as in hopes of cultivating useful sources. (She’d managed both.)

When King Faraday showed up, around the time the sun really did start setting, she smiled friendly razors at him and called him _Mr. Faraday_ and he called her _Miss Lane_ in return; this was their routine. If he saw anything flat and mirrored in her eyes, he took it for her usual distrust and nothing more.

Lois didn’t rat Godfrey out. She’d pay for that, later, if Ultraman did spill the Apokoliptan beans next time the Feds got him in custody, but she hadn’t decided what to do with this information yet, and if she told the government they’d _tell_ her what to do. She hated that.

The Cold War had only been over for ten years. The _last_ thing Lois wanted was to be responsible for the Earth being dragged into someone else’s Forever War. But how did she best avoid that?

She went home late that night, still in wet socks, having kept her own council without, she thought, raising any suspicions, and thought about that question most of the night. Around three o’clock she got out of bed and made herself some cocoa.

Neither hot chocolate milk nor slowly dissolving mini marshmallows shed any light on questions of interstellar espionage, but the ritual and the gentle sweetness soothed her down enough to get a few hours of sleep.

* * *

Lois and Godfrey’s notes had all survived Ultraman’s attack on the library, surprisingly, and only been a little damaged by the librarians piling them into a box to get them safely out of the way, while work began on patching the wall.

(Of the remaining muffins and Lois' collection of pencils there was no word, but as casualties went these were easily forsaken.)

In a moment of incredible competence and goodwill on the part of either CBI or the Metropolis PD, the papers had been rapidly dismissed as useful evidence in the case, and she’d come home to an answering machine message inviting her to reclaim them. They were used to her by now down at the station, but this was still fast turnaround.

She’d gotten Jimmy from the office to run down and fetch them to her place when she realized she wasn’t going to have time to make it to the station before the Evidence desk locked up for the night, and so (thank you Jimmy) they were waiting in the middle of her kitchen table when she got home, after six hours of work and three of unproductive debrief with the federal alphabet soup.

She hadn’t even managed to get any hints about how they knew to track whatever Godfrey had done to summon the Warden. She didn’t think her interrogators (interviewers, technically, but she interviewed people for a living and when law enforcement did it it was _something else_) even knew.

Alex Luthor had dropped in, near the end of the session, which had been a little more useful, but only a little. Mostly because she hadn’t been honest with him, either. Maybe later. He was sort of the world expert in aliens.

Maybe someone he knew in space would have a second opinion on Apokolips and New Genesis, and their long slow war.

Godfrey had called first thing in morning, when she was stumbling around trying to remember how to make coffee, to let her know (in suitably oblique terms) that Ultraman had escaped Granny Goodness, but at least appeared to have fled the planet in the process. That was something.

She’d told him to come over later, the cops were giving them back all the stuff they’d both left at the crime scene; she’d leave the door unlocked for him. (Even though he probably had some sort of alien gadget that could pop it open in a second.)

He was now due in half an hour.

Lois started to unpack the box, busily setting things back in order while trying not to mix them up with the papers her table was already covered in. And began to come to a distressing conclusion.

When Godfrey walked in her apartment door, she raised her head from the half-arranged stacks. Her dismay must have been obvious, because he hesitated, framed in the doorway.

“We can’t publish the book,” Lois said.

Godfrey’s eyebrows bent together. He closed the door behind him. “No?”

She shook her head. “Godfrey. Look. Not telling the public about you goes against everything I believe in.”

“Lois…” The hurt and concern on his face, filling the eyes behind those stupid glasses he didn’t need, was almost certainly entirely real, and _definitely_ entirely being used to manipulate her. “I _am_ trying to _help_.”

“I know!” she said, waving her hand and raising her voice to cut him off when he started to object, or try to reason with her. “I _believe_ you, that’s the thing.”

She wished she didn’t. She wished he wasn’t her friend. There were a lot of things she questioned about his story, but she actually did _believe_ he was benevolent. “I know: you mean well, and there’s nothing actually in the book that isn’t _true_.

“But you’re here on a _psy-op_ to shape the public perspective, and when eventually you go public—when you throw yourself in front of lasers for somebody else, or your king establishes acceptable terms with enough Earth governments, or the Highfather turns up on our doorstep, or Ultraman outs you—I can’t have my name on a book you used for it. No one would ever trust me again, and they’d be _right_ not to.

“I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I’ll keep your secret, but I can’t tell your lie for you.”

Godfrey drew a breath, like he was going to argue, and let it out again. Looked slightly smaller, once he had. “Alright. That’s fair. Can I have my notes back, though? I promise not to use any of your wording.”

Lois dumped everything back in the box, and shoved it at him. “Here.” He might not use her wording, though she wasn’t sure he could completely avoid it at this stage, but even if he drafted a new manuscript from scratch he’d still be using her work. All the effort, the structure and emotion, the tower of philosophy they’d pieced together, all the help she'd given him, in retrospect, _understanding what humans needed and wanted to hear_—the book that had been on the brink of becoming real would never exist, now, and the work she’d done on it would be repurposed into a different one, that had someone else’s name on it, or Godfrey’s own alias alone.

He wasn’t stealing it. She was giving it up. But it was still a wrench.

She’d tell Perry she’d dropped out because of irreconcilable philosophical differences. Or Ultraman. She tried not to use Ultraman as an excuse, even when he was the reason; she could take her payment for that now, use him as a cover. Godfrey would back her play, if she said he’d run scared from eye lasers. He’d be far from the first guy, after all.

The Herald of Apokolips hovered in her kitchen. “Is it okay to mention you in the foreword?”

She nodded, distractedly, her eyes already fixed on another, unrelated piece of paper that she was only half absorbing. It was the transcript of an interview she’d done last week.

That article was already on its way to the printer. She needed to file this away somewhere she might be able to find it, if she ever needed a reference or a quote about grocery chains in the Metropolis area again.

Godfrey shifted from one foot to another, tucked the box against his side, though it was a little too big to actually stick under his arm. “Lois…” he said uncertainly. “I _am_ sorry.”

“About what?” The next piece of paper was actually an old shopping list. Lois pretended to be absorbed in it anyway. Hmm, she actually needed all these things again, she could reuse this.

“Lying?”

Lois finally looked up—over the edge of the list and a stack of other random papers she’d brought with her, when she turned a few degrees toward him. “Godfrey, you’re a spy, of course you lied to me. I’m not mad about that, I’m mad about all the things _I_ can’t write because _you’re_ lying to everyone. I hate knowing things I can’t publish.”

She was used to pumping sources, as ruthlessly as it took, and in a way that was all he’d done to her.

‘Believing a reporter likes you is like believing you’re special to a stripper’ was a joke she’d heard probably a lot more often than Perry would believe, but it wasn’t completely wrong. The only difference between Lois and Godfrey was what they served—Lois cared about the truth. Godfrey had a king.

She wasn’t mad that Godfrey had lied to her. She was mad that she’d believed him.

“When you do go public,” she said to her grocery list, a bit of an edge in her voice that she had no reason to hide. “You’ll give me first crack at the story?”

“…yes. Yes, of course.” The box shifted again, back into both of his hands, as he backed up toward her door. “Thank you, Lois. I’m…sorry. We’ll talk later?”

Later. Yes. She should start getting this story pulled together for the day when it eventually broke. More about his government, his planet, his king. “I’ll call you,” she said, only a little brusquely, and let him juggle the box of papers to get the door open again.

“Ardon,” she said, as he was closing it behind him, box balanced very unstably against his right hip. “I’m going to have many questions.” If she could get together enough sources to fact-check any of what he said, maybe she could even run a piece about the New Gods _before_ he came clean, main source redacted but supporting evidence available. Maybe she could score an interview with Granny Goodness about chasing Ultraman.

It wouldn’t win her any prizes for journalism, probably, but it would certainly get people talking.

“…I’d expect nothing less,” said Godfrey, in a significantly less unhappy voice. And pulled the door shut behind him.

Lois didn’t bother to get up and lock it. No one and nothing she was afraid of could be kept out by a locked door.

**Author's Note:**

> Stg Godfrey 'Clark Kenting' with big horn-rimmed glasses is canon. His original character design was based on Jerry Falwell. 
> 
> He went on TV and used mind control to incite mobs to attack superheroes, so that was a pretty pointed design choice. 😂
> 
> This is set from I think May of 1999 to June of 2001, which is why they're emailing but Lois doesn't have a cell phone.


End file.
